Hands-on with Hulu Plus

The $10/month Hulu Plus promises subscribers more shows on more devices than …

Hulu yesterday announced its premium service tier called Hulu Plus, meant to extend the free version of Hulu by offering access to more shows on more devices (including your TV, game console, and smartphone). Hulu Plus hasn't yet officially launched to the public, but the company plans to send out waves of invitations to users over the coming months. We got our hands on one and gave the service a try.

Hulu's $9.99 monthly service has two main draws: expanded content and availability on more devices. That content remains ad-supported, just like on the free version of Hulu, but you can get more of it to stream. While many content providers limit their free offerings to just the latest few episodes, Plus users can watch full back seasons of numerous shows, including every X-Files ever made, all six seasons of Grey's Anatomy, the entirety of The Office, and more.

Skeptics note that many of these seasons are already accessible to Netflix subscribers, which is true. However, Netflix doesn't offer many of those back seasons for streaming—only on DVD.

For example, Ars contributor Chris Foresman expressed interest in old seasons of Greatest American Hero—Netflix offers some episodes to stream, but the others you have to get on disc. Not so for Hulu Plus: all are available to stream at any time. The same applies to old seasons of Grey's Anatomy, which Netflix only offers on DVD until season 5.

The other main element to the subscription service is its availability outside of the standard desktop browser. Finally! For now, Hulu Plus only offers mobile apps on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, though the company promises more mobile apps are coming. Additionally, Hulu Plus currently works on Samsung TVs and Blu-ray players, with support for PS3, Xbox 360, and Sony and Vizio TVs/Blu-ray players coming in the future.

We tested Hulu Plus on both an iPhone 4 and iPad—the client is already available on the App Store as a universal app, so the same download works on all supported iOS devices. Once you log in with your Hulu Plus-enabled account, you can browse through the same content you would on the Web. There are tabs for featured content, what's currently popular, a search interface, an alphabetical list of TV shows, and more:

Under "More," you can access movies, content that has been recently added to the site, your personal queue, your history, your subscriptions, and a way to sign out:

The interface is speedy and works as expected. There were no hangs when tapping on items or navigating through lists. When you perform a search for a show, you can either tap on that show to begin watching it right away or tap on the arrow to see details about it, add it to your queue, and see related videos:

Basically, the app works as you would expect any video-watching app on the iPhone to work. It proved generally intuitive and we didn't have any complaints about the interface. (We did, however, experience a couple of crashes on the iPad version.)

When it comes to actually watching the videos, we had a sort of hit-or-miss experience. Videos stream over both WiFi and 3G. If you use 3G, though, you'll want to be careful of crossing your monthly data limits.

The video quality over both WiFi and 3G is OK—Hulu says it will stream HD content where available, but at least on the iPhone I used for testing, the content all appeared in the same moderate quality. (On the iPad, it was more obvious when you were watching an HD stream versus an SD stream.)

You can watch in landscape or portrait mode and scrub across the video, but just like on the computer, doing so may get you stuck at the next ad spot until the video resumes:

We also had some issues scrubbing videos on the iPhone app; some of the streams died altogether when we tried to skip ahead while others resumed just fine.

The draw here is that users can now finally watch this content on their devices that previously didn't have access to Hulu. Now there's a solution in a native app for iOS users (and soon to be other mobile OS users), but is it worth $10 per month?

Personally, I'm leaning towards "no" due to the way I use Hulu. I watch only a small subset of shows through the service, and those are the ones that I can already get for free over the air—in fact, I usually watch Hulu only when I forget to record a show. Since I keep up on those particular shows, I don't usually watch back episodes, either.

However, plenty of users do want to watch every single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they don't want to wait for the DVDs to arrive in the mail, and they want to do so in places where they don't have a computer. For these users, $10 per month may well be worth it, especially because you can decide to cancel at any time after you get your Buffy fix (canceling is easy and can be done from your account settings on the website).